The Oil Drum: Canada

Re: Mexico and remitances

I often shop at grocery stores with a high proportion of Mexicans over hre without papers as clients. In Harris County, Tx (Houston, Deer Park, Pasadena and a host of smaller suburbs) around 20% of the population is here without papers, so-called illegal immigrants. Many of these folks send cash home to Mexico and other countries to help the wives, mothers and children left behind in the villages. Its the top source of foreign exchange for the average Mexican and is preventing famine in lots of villages.

The Friday and Saturday lines at these stores for check-cashing ect. are down by about 2/3rds. The reason there have been few lay-offs in the construction downterm is the use of all the undocumented workers-they are not reported, so their lay-offs and unemployment doesn't show up on the statistics. The employers pay around $8 per hour for the workers, but they save by not paying social security, purchasing Workman's Compensation or Health insurance and the undocumented workers can be easily exploited and abused with improper equipment and unsafe jobs. Who in their right mind is going to work cleaning tanks of carcinogenic goop? so the petrochemical refiner hires a cotroctor who hires a sub-contractor who isn't picky about papers .

This money is the very tenuous lifeline that keeps a whole lot of village communities in Mexico afloat. In the last few years the main revolutionary activity is in states in central and southern Mexico-Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerro, Tobasco. The states in the north are controlled by the drug lords. As conditions remain miserable or become worse since NAFTA, emmegration to the US has been a safety valve. The men and women who come to the US are the very best people in Mexico. They may not be very educated, but they have a strong sense of duty to their familiy. They will do any kind of labor to fulfil their obligations, and endure miserable living conditions by camping on the floor of a house that rents to wetbacks a bed space for $50-$100 a week eating tortillas, canned beans and sardines. But, because they are up here and importing their childrn, wives, brothers, sisters as quickly as they can there isn't a big enough base of people who want a real change to grab the power from the rich men who own Mexico still living in Mexico. Its a safety valve.
The Lou Dobbs Know Nothing anti-illegal immigrant stance has stuck the escape valve closed. The more effective the paramilitary militias are in throwing immigrants out of the US, the more misery in central and southern Mexico.

My last name, Ebersole is a Pennsylvania Dutch name. I am descended from one of six brothers that immigrated to Lancaster County. They took as their last name the name of the village that they came from in the Canton of Apenzell (SP?), which shows they were peasant farmers and apparently sent money home to help each other immigrate, and although they were Mennonites, a variety of Anabaptists, came for economic opportunity. They got to the 13 Colonies before there was much restriction on immigration. They are not a lot different from the Mexicans and Central Americans that are coming over here now.

I'm a big believer in learning history, because if I reflrvt on history and my current actions and behavior I can often see better ways of taking action. I don't think that history repeats itself, but human reactions to many similar life situations can show us more useful ways of behaving. Peak Oil is a unique world event, but changing situations altered by prior human behavir isn't unique. Around here people often quote authors like Jevon or Diamond who are trying to do the same thing-determine the best courses of action based on human history. They are far from being the first historians to take this approach. But, we need to go a step or two farther when we read and absorb these histories and try to see how our lives fit in. This approach was the approach of Confucious, the Chinese philosopher from the 4th century B.C.E. and also a number of religeous teachers like Jesus. When you take away the superstition there's a good set of techniques for dealing with a lot of human problems.One of these is the concept of stewardship-we don't own the earth, but are rather entrusted with it for the benefit of god. I don't know whether god made man, but I do know that man makes god-we all have different concepts, often contradictory. But we do have a duty IMHO to leave the world a better place and to help each other as much as possible. In the industrial west we never assumed our duties and obligations to each other and to the world as we should, and the path isn't occult.Its pretty obvious to any person who reflects on the world that our root problem is overpopulation, that climate change because of human behavior would be greatly reduced if we had a population close to the sustainable population of the earth. Its also clear that where the population increase is happening is amoung the destitute and uneducated-the 1.6 billion people who don't have any access to electricity, living hand to mouth and not educating their children. These poor starving children are the pool from which fanatics recruit suicide bombers. Hope is a necessity in the human mental balance. If they ncan't have hope from economic expectations, they seek the solace of the christian Kingdom of Heaven or the 13th Imman if Shia or the 72 virgins if Sunni. Its also doubtful that peak oil would be an urgent problem with 1/3rd as many consumers as today.

Its very clear-we need to educate the children of themost hopeless people on the planet, to get them sustainable electricity and access to the internet and the hope that they will become prosperous too.
Bob Ebersole